As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), the primary purpose of HPMOR is to serve as a recruiting tool for Less Wrong and SIAI. Therefore, we don’t necessarily want to measure raw readership numbers, but what the advertisers call the “conversion rate”: the number of HPMOR readers who join Less Wrong. This rate will be different from raw readership, because once a reader has converted, we no longer care whether he reads HPMOR or not.
In practical terms, the trick with HPMOR is to spend just the right amount of time on updates, in order to release the updates frequently enough to attract new readers (who might otherwise be turned off by what they perceive as a “dead” fanfic) -- yet not so frequently that their marginal utility becomes negative.
That’s an interesting angle. I think we actually could measure conversions to some extent.
The survey asks after MoR, and also how long a user has been around, so one could filter for any survey set mentioning MoR and subtract their longevity from the date to figure out what was their ‘latest’ chapter before joining LW.
A second way which would probably work better is to leverage the usernames in the review data set and compare to a list of LessWrong users & account registration date, to do much the same thing: take every username which appears on both lists, and the LW account registration date, and credit them to the chapter appearing just before their LW account registration. (If their LW account precedes their first MoR review, it’d probably be best to eliminate them from consideration.)
As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), the primary purpose of HPMOR is to serve as a recruiting tool for Less Wrong and SIAI. Therefore, we don’t necessarily want to measure raw readership numbers, but what the advertisers call the “conversion rate”: the number of HPMOR readers who join Less Wrong. This rate will be different from raw readership, because once a reader has converted, we no longer care whether he reads HPMOR or not.
In practical terms, the trick with HPMOR is to spend just the right amount of time on updates, in order to release the updates frequently enough to attract new readers (who might otherwise be turned off by what they perceive as a “dead” fanfic) -- yet not so frequently that their marginal utility becomes negative.
That’s an interesting angle. I think we actually could measure conversions to some extent.
The survey asks after MoR, and also how long a user has been around, so one could filter for any survey set mentioning MoR and subtract their longevity from the date to figure out what was their ‘latest’ chapter before joining LW.
A second way which would probably work better is to leverage the usernames in the review data set and compare to a list of LessWrong users & account registration date, to do much the same thing: take every username which appears on both lists, and the LW account registration date, and credit them to the chapter appearing just before their LW account registration. (If their LW account precedes their first MoR review, it’d probably be best to eliminate them from consideration.)
Also, I’d check for their mentioning MoR in introduction posts. If I hadn’t taken the survey, that’s how you’d pick me up, for instance.